UH mappers help find lost world

UH mappers help find lost world

1of6Ramesh Shrestha is a UH professor and director of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping. Behind him is a recent pulsed-laser image of a rain forest in Honduras.Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

2of6Provided images using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology that is used by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston.Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

3of6Ramesh Shresthy director of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston looks with staff researcher Michael Sartori at recent imaging from Honduras of seen through the imaging provided by LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology that gives an accurate account of the typography of an area Thursday, May 23, 2013, in Houston. LiDAR uses a remote sensing method from an airplane pulsing light 100,000 points a second to give measurements of the Earth. ( Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle )Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

4of6Images captured with lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technology are used by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at UH.Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

6of6Michael Sartori, a staff researcher at UH, points out the clear outlines of a large city found in a dense forest in Belize as seen through lidar imaging technology.Photo: Johnny Hanson, Staff

It's not every day you help discover a lost world.

Just ask the people at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston.

But because finding a lost world is a journey, let's not start at the end.

In 2009, NASA funded a project to go to Belize and map some Mayan ruins in the rain forest using a laser tool to measure distances.

Here's how Ramesh Shrestha, director of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, describes it: From a small plane traveling overhead, lidar shoots pulses of laser to the ground, some 100,000 per second. The data sent back can "map" the terrain, after software strips away the vegetation.

Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, isn't new - cruder forms have been around for decades - but it's newly portable and precise.

"I'm not an archaeologist," Shrestha hastens to point out. "I use what the technology is to get the best data."

The lidar results from Belize showed twice as many ruins as archaeologists had predicted. (Bear in mind that an archaeological team using traditional methods would spend years, or decades, discovering what took lidar a matter of days.)

If you didn't grow up in Honduras, you probably haven't heard the stories about La Ciudad Blanca, the White City of local myth. But Elkins had heard the stories, and he knew the grip they held on the national imagination. For centuries, explorers and scientists have claimed to find the city, but none had.

Elkins also knew about La Mosquitia, a hot, heavily forested and impenetrable region of Honduras as nasty as its name. There are no roads or even paths.

With funding from the National Science Foundation and Elkins, the laser mappers (a joint project of UH and the University of California, Berkeley) spent 10 days collecting lidar data. "But from the very beginning we said we're not guaranteeing anything," Shrestha says.

When the software did its magic and revealed the terrain, Shrestha says, "I didn't see it. I'm obviously not used to looking at it."

What was revealed was a large city: pyramids, even a ball court. A second city was unearthed in another area. But who lived in these cities, and why did they leave? That isn't clear.

The National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping is housed in a decidedly unfancy room at UH: lots of screens, not a lot of charm.

On the day we visit, researcher Michael Sartori is at his PC, and researcher Juan Carlos Fernandez Diaz is busy filling out an unromantic expense report. "I have most of the fun most of the time," Fernandez Diaz says, philosophically.

He grew up in Honduras hearing tales of La Ciudad Blanca. "The story has different origins, and there are many, many different stories," he says. "It's not like a coherent legend. There are many threads to it."

Spanish explorers

The legend stems from accounts of explorer Hernan Cortes and a bishop of Honduras which describe a large city in a river valley in the jungles of the Mosquito Coast. The bishop wrote to the king of Spain telling him of the White City's riches; his guides told stories of nobles there who ate from plates of gold. From there, the legend grew. La Ciudad Blanca is even cited as the birthplace of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

Much of what we usually think of as Maya, or Meso-American, culture is centered in the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and western Honduras.

But this new civilization is in eastern Honduras, outside the known Maya sphere. There are Maya elements visible, as well as some that are not. "Is it extending the Maya culture, or is this something new?" Fernandez Diaz asks. "Most believe it is something different."

This is almost certainly not a mythic city made of gold, he says. "But where in space and time does it belong? How does it relate to other cultures?"

For now, he leans toward the interpretation of the late archaeologist George Hasemann, who believed there was not one Ciudad Blanca, but many.

From Nepal to UH

Ramesh Shrestha knows a little about lost worlds, because he comes from one. His life story is as improbable as finding a civilization in a rain forest.

"I never in my wildest dreams imagined what I have seen today," he says.

Shrestha, who at 63 looks for all the world as if he could play on golf's senior tour, was born in a tiny mountain village in Nepal, with no heat or electricity, the kind of place where if you didn't grow it, you didn't eat it.

Yet somehow his parents knew that education was important. "Mine was the first generation in the village to go to elementary school," he says. Shrestha's parents and others brought in a teacher from a larger town.

Then, at 13, Shrestha and his brother left home to move to a bigger town for more education and then to the capital, Kathmandu, where he got into the best high school and then to college.

Luck and pluck landed him one of three open spots at Northeast London Polytechnic, where he got a degree in mapping. Eventually, with help from American patrons, he got to Oregon State and then on to a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Shrestha has been at UH since 2010. "I guess I did pretty well, let's just put it that way," he says. "I think I've skipped a couple of hundred years."

Technological promise

The future is looking interesting in the best way. For now, Elkins is doing a documentary on the discovery, and there will be a field expedition late this year or early next to see what actually is on the ground. The Honduran military is cutting paths into the rain forest.

Lidar technology has an even brighter future. Archaeologists are, of course, jockeying to be next. But geologists dealing with faults in the Earth are interested, as well. A newer technology, green lidar, can even "see" through water.

Shrestha is looking forward to developing the next generation of scientists and providing the best possible education.

Meanwhile, in Canada, there's lidar that can shoot laser at a rate of 900,000 pulses per second.

Fernandez Diaz believes the Mosquitia discovery will be argued in scientific circles for 10 or 20 years. Textbooks will be rewritten, he says.

Kyrie O'Connor is senior editor and columnist at the Houston Chronicle. From 2003 to 2012, she was deputy managing editor/features. She came to the Houston Chronicle from The Hartford Courant, where she was assistant managing editor/features.

A native of Pittsford, N.Y., she received a B.A. in English cum laude from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.